Trashcollecting
by reniRCx
Summary: Another boring D-rank mission for teams 7 and 10 doesn't quite go as planned. Set between the Land of the Waves and Chunin Exam arcs. Own nothing.


**A/N: Well, this was inspired by two hours of pure boredom via picking up trash in a local park for community service. And boredom=Naruto fanfiction. So here it is.

* * *

**

Sasuke Uchiha leaned against the railing, doing his best to tune out the banter of his two squad-mates as they waited for their sensei to show up. Bored, he took out a kunai and started twirling it around in his fingers, listening with complete disinterest to Sakura laying in to Naruto about something inappropriate he'd said.

Kakashi showed up about half an hour after the scheduled time, which was actually fairly early for him. But the sensei's being almost on time was not the biggest surprise of the morning. No it was who he was with.

Team 10 sans Asuma walked behind Kakashi, Ino looking annoyed, Choji slightly confused, and Shikamaru almost as bored as Sasuke looked.

"What are they doing here?" Naruto demanded the second they were within hearing distance. "I thought we were doing a mission today!"

"We are," Kakashi assured the hyperactive blond. Sasuke rolled his eyes. He spoke as though the useless D-ranks they'd been doing lately even counted as missions.

"Then why are they here?" Naruto asked, impatient for a straight answer.

"Asuma has other duties to attend to today, so we decided that his team should join us for our mission today," Kakashi finished. Naruto opened his mouth to protest, but Kakashi cut him off by continuing "If anyone here has a problem with this, I don't want to hear it. If you would like, you can sit out the mission, but keep in mind that you would be letting down your team and village." Kakashi surveyed the group of skeptical-looking Genin. "Well, let's get going then."

"What's our mission today, Sensei?" Sakura asked reasonably once they had set off, Kakashi in the lead.

"Ahm," Kakashi paused, knowing that they would like what was coming even less than the two teams had liked the concept of working together. "Today, we're going to the park to clean up trash people have left there."

Kakashi waited patiently through a round of protests. "It is a legitimate mission, as keeping our village pristine is as important as defending it, in its own way." As Kakashi didn't believe this himself, it didn't sound very convincing.

Shikamaru was actually pleased with how their day was going to be. Trash-collecting would be a mission that he could easily not do the work for and still get the credit.

The others were less pleased, particularly Naruto, who had been looking forward to a more exciting mission today. "But Kakashi-" he whined, forgetting the Jonin's earlier warning about protests.

"Leave it, Naruto. It's only one day," Shikamaru interrupted, effectively shutting Naruto up.

"Yeah, this will be a boring mission but at least it's not hard," Choji agreed.

"But I want a hard mission! I want to be able to test my skills and do the kinds of missions that I've trained for!" Naruto yelled. Sasuke refrained from commenting that a voice a third of the volume would have sufficed. _At least I can go off by myself during the mission, waste of time as it is, _the Uchiha thought almost optimistically.

When they reached the park and received their trash bags and gloves, the two teams dispersed. Sasuke made for one of the trails, but Sakura hurried to catch up.

"Sasuke-kun, wait up!" she said, her trash bag billowing behind her.

"What do you want?" he asked irritably.

"Don't you think we should do this mission together, as a team?" she asked, her cheeks turning pink as she spoke.

"No, though I'm sure Naruto would be a great proponent of that idea," Sasuke replied, resuming walking.

Sakura continued to follow him. "Naruto already left. He was determined to collect the most trash out of any of us," she said.

"We'll get more done if we split up," Sasuke said brusquely, trying to find some way to get rid of his annoying teammate. "And the mission will be done sooner, and the village will be cleaner."

Sakura missed the sarcastic inflection and sighed. "Alright. I'll do the trail over there." She walked off with her head down.

But she'd given Sasuke another concern. Naruto was actually planning to try his best on this useless mission? He would definitely collect the most trash; no one else would even be trying. And then he'd gloat about it for days, no matter how many times Sasuke outshone him in training and other missions. _Oh well, _he thought, fighting back his natural sense of competition. Number one trash collector was not at all impressive. It was childish to even want the unofficial title.

_I'll just pick up what I see, _Sasuke decided, stooping to grab a candy wrapper lying at the side of the path. Then he saw a plastic bottle a little farther in and went to fetch it. _I won't really be trying…it's not even a real competition. _

_

* * *

_

After half an hour of hard work, Naruto's trash bag was half-full. _This must be way more than anyone else has. I bet Sasuke's not even trying to get the most, _Naruto thought confidently. _But Kakashi-sensei said to meet back at the trailhead in two hours, so I'll use all that time to get the most! _he decided.

* * *

Sakura walked along a different trail, annoyance with Sasuke's unfriendliness quickly shifting into pure boredom. Her back ached from constantly stooping down to collect tiny pieces of garbage, and she actually smiled in triumph when she spotted a whole plastic bottle. _It's not a good day when I get excited about finding a plastic bottle in the woods, _she thought cleverly. If Sasuke-kun were, here, he might think it was clever, too. He might even smile at it, or say something like _"You're so clever, Sakura."_

The pink-haired girl sighed. If fantasies of being in Sasuke's company were what were going to get her through this boring day, then let them come.

* * *

Ino almost skipped along the trail, desperate not to look as excited as she was, but trying to contain herself. She hurried forward, not evens stopping to collect what trash she noticed on the side of the trail.

Stupid Sakura had tried to work as a team with him. As though _that _would ever work. Sakura may be the smart one, but Ino knew people better. She knew that if she claimed to _accidentally _have gone down the other end of the trail Sasuke was on, he would never suspect trickery and a casual suggestion to team up might have more of a chance of working than Sakura's desperate plea.

_Here he comes now! _Ino smoothed her long ponytail, bringing it in front of her shoulder. "Oh, hi Sasuke," she said flirtatiously. "I didn't realize this was the same trail as you were on."

"Of course you did," Sasuke replied bluntly.

Ino pretended not to know what he was talking about. "Well, since you did one half of the trail already and I did the other, we should just head back and try to get in another trail before we have to meet up with Kakashi," she suggested, making perfect sense.

"No, your bag is empty while mine is at least half-filled. It doesn't make sense that one half of the trail would have more trash than the other. Since you don't seem to be intent on the mission, how about we both keep going in the direction we were?" Sasuke asked, continuing past where Ino stood.

"Well, I might have missed a few things. But you probably did, too!" Ino accused, angry at his low opinion of her.

"Perfect. We'll check each other's side for errors," Sasuke said in a monotonous voice that contained undetectable sarcasm.

Ino frowned. Well, it was kind of like working together. It would give them an excuse to meet up at the end and talk a little, and if Sakura saw, it would drive her crazy! Ino smiled at the unexpected progression of events and continued down the trail opposite Sasuke.

* * *

"Shikamaru, what are you doing?" Choji asked after he followed his friend into the woods a ways only to watch Shikamaru find a clearing a little ways in and lay down on a picnic table. "We're supposed to be doing the mission!"

"Asuma's not even here; this mission's just to keep us out of trouble," Shika responded. "It's just a bother. Not even worth trying."

"Well, I'm going to go pick up some trash," Choji said loudly, trying to set a good example. His shoulders slumped when Shika didn't move an inch, much less make a move to follow his lead.

Shikamaru sighed and looked up at the clouds, looking forward to a peaceful two hours lying in the sun. Then he would head back, maybe pick up a few pieces of trash; saying that he didn't find _much _would be more believable than saying that he found nothing at all.

Despite the fact that she'd actually tried to find trash on the second half of the path, Ino was the first one back. Kakashi was reading- no, she'd been warned by Asuma not to wonder what Kakashi was reading.

She toyed with her hair for awhile and stuffed some fallen leaves in her trash bag to make it look like she had done more than she really had.

Choji came back into the clearing next with a respectably bulky trash bag. He sat on the bench opposite Ino and eagerly took a bag of potato chips out of his backpack. "'Ant un?" he asked her with his mouth full, proffering the bag.

"No thanks, Ino replied crisply. "Weren't you with Shikamaru?"

"He went off on his own. We thought we'd get more ground covered that way," Choji replied, this time having the courtesy to swallow before answering.

"Yeah, right," Ino muttered, willing to bet that their lazy teammate would come back with a completely empty bag. Well, at least Ino's wouldn't be the worst.

Shikamaru was almost greatful for the scream for a split second. He had been close to falling asleep, and falling asleep when you're supposed to be doing a mission was not exactly in the ninja handbook.

But he was up and alert the second he heard it. This wasn't exactly a mission that called for screaming. The voice was probably female, and from experience, not Ino.

Shikamaru paused. There were at least six other ninjas in this general area. Someone else would deal with it. He waited a few moments, then decided that he couldn't go back to cloud-watching without at least knowing what was going on.

Muttering something about troublesome girls, Shikamaru ran into the woods.

* * *

Sakura felt like she was frozen in place. She knew that there would be missions in the future where she could expect to see things like this, but she wasn't mentally prepared today. The body lying a little ways from the path, the odor of rotting flesh, caused her control to slip and a scream rang out.

A minute later, Shikamaru was there. Part of Sakura was disappointed that it wasn't Sasuke, but even she knew that this was too serious a situation to be complaining about such things.

"Ugh. We have to clean _this _up? They should at least give us C-rank credit for this," Shikamaru said impassively, his bored, stable voice serving to calm Sakura down.

"I was walking down the trail, and it was just…there," she said.

"I'll see if he has any ID on him," Shika said, for once taking charge. "This body can't be more than a few weeks old."

Shikamaru crossed the final few steps toward the body and pulled a wallet out of the back pocket. "Zansa Emelec," he read from a card.

"I haven't heard of him," Sakura said, now more intrigued by the newfound mystery than the gruesomeness of their discovery.

"How troublesome. We're assigned a totally useless mission, and we get this," Shika complained. "I can put it in my trash bag and we'll take it back to Kakashi."

"All right," Sakura said. Together, they moved the body into Shikamaru's bag and he dragged it back to the meeting place, where everyone but Naruto was waiting.

Kakashi actually looked up from his reading when the two Genin and the stench of the dead body they were carrying with them entered the clearing. "What have you got there?" Kakashi asked, the words light but the tone concerned.

"Just this," Shikamaru said, using a kunai to cut a slit in the black trash bag.

Everyone's reaction was delayed, however, by the arrival of Naruto. "I have my trash bag completely filled! I did better than any of you!" he yelled triumphantly.

"Actually, I think Shikamaru's bag is the most interesting," Kakashi responded, examining the wallet Shika had given him.

"What?" Naruto called. But no one bothered explaining.

Sasuke smirked, both at Naruto's slightly amusing entrance and the fact that his bag, which was admittedly far smaller than Naruto's, would be overlooked.

"This man has been missing for almost three weeks. He probably went for a walk in the woods and died of a heart attack," Kakashi surmised. "You two were lucky to have found him while he was still recognizable."

"Then this mission wasn't a total failure," Choji promoted optimistically.

"I suppose not," Shikamaru allowed. "Though I could think of better things to do with my time."

* * *

**A/N: Well, that was...bad. Oh well. Reviews please? xD**


End file.
